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Shutting down is self-protection
What shutdown does
Some stress responses sharpen the senses to fight, flee, or rise to a challenge. Others try to make a hard moment less awful to be in. In some situations shutting down helps, but after enough experiences where it worked, it can become a chronic way of relating to life: whenever things get difficult, the body goes to the place where it can't feel it as much.
The care underneath
Underneath is care. It is the same impulse that makes someone throw their body over a person they love so that person does not have to experience something terrible. That part of a person wants the best for them, and it can move from protection to encouragement and curiosity about what is possible, talking to them the way someone who trusts them would, with a reminder that they have done really hard things before.
Training ahead of time
Building other stress responses, ones that engage with life, takes training ahead of time. In the moment, what helps is the memory of having done it.
Why do wounded people sometimes feel little pain?
Anesthesiologist Henry Beecher published a paper in 1946 on soldiers he treated at Anzio during World War II. Many badly wounded men reported little pain and asked for far less relief than civilians with comparable injuries. Beecher proposed that the meaning of the wound mattered: for a soldier, it meant escape from the battlefield. Later research on stress-induced analgesia showed that the body can release its own pain-dampening chemicals in moments of danger.
How does emotional avoidance become a habit?
Behavior that brings relief tends to be repeated, which psychologists call negative reinforcement. Each time shutting down ends an unpleasant feeling, the link between difficulty and shutting down grows stronger. Steven Hayes and colleagues at the University of Nevada, Reno, introduced the term experiential avoidance in a 1996 paper to describe attempts to escape unwanted thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The concept is central to acceptance and commitment therapy.
How do people train for stressful moments ahead of time?
Psychologist Donald Meichenbaum developed stress inoculation training at the University of Waterloo in the 1970s. It teaches coping skills in three phases: understanding how stress works, practicing skills, and rehearsing them under gradually increasing demands. The name comes from the idea of a vaccine, in which controlled exposure builds resistance. The approach has since been used with soldiers, athletes, and surgeons.
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